Von der Leyen: Only skilled users can bypass blocks - so everyone except politicians.
Archive 13.3.2009 - 27.4.2009
Surveillance mania and internet censorship - "If the law comes into force as planned, however, every internet user should carefully consider whether they still want to visit unknown web addresses. If one were to accidentally or provoked by malicious hints to a stop sign, then de facto a house search or worse would threaten. Staudigl also confirmed this: 'Whether and possibly who has committed an offense can regularly only be clarified through the subsequent criminal investigations.'" - because, after all, we live in a democratic legal state, not in a banana republic where the state can assume what it wants without control by the citizen and where citizens then simply feel the full force of the power apparatus due to technical proto-indicators. Or maybe not?
Vioxx maker Merck and Co drew up doctor hit list | The Australian - "AN international drug company made a hit list of doctors who had to be "neutralised" or discredited because they criticised the anti-arthritis drug the pharmaceutical giant produced."
E-Books: Publishers are blocking markets - this stinks. The next arrogant industry that doesn't give a damn about customer wishes. What use is the idiotic geographical limitation of the offer to me as a customer, if, for example, American authors are simply no longer available in the English original in Germany? Libri and Co. only sell the translations as eBooks.
Federal government wants to block internet access with access controls - I'm already looking forward to the first trojan, or the first XSS attack, which will then call up sites from the block list in the background. Or how about HTML emails that refer to images on blocked pages? You can definitely get a lot of suspects that way ...
Lactose intolerance - how lactose intolerance is distributed around the world. (because I just had a discussion about it)
Mothers Ruin Software: Suspicious Package - interesting tool to quickly take a look at installation packages with QuickLook without having to start them.
Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems - oops. IBM must be in a bad mood now ...
Mac-Bot-Netz? - not that I would believe the nonsense about the "unassailable MacOS X" that some Apple disciples spread (Hello Apple - could we maybe get more detailed update descriptions beyond "improves compatibility and increases stability"? Thanks!), but would I necessarily believe a store that has always tried to sell strange products to Apple owners and has always tried to spread panic and purchases of its software with more than questionable press releases?
Tax-free Internet shopping may be at an end - compared to the chaos in the USA with taxes, the European tax law is quite simple and transparent ...
tweenbot - some stories are just nice.
Tropo - a hosted telephony system (e.g. for voicemail systems or similar) with API for programming plugins in various scripting languages. There are some things ...
wikileaks-Kram doch etwas anders als ursprünglich behauptet - as it turns out, the problem seems to lie somewhere between the domain owner and the operator. Or with both. Or between the ears of one of the two. Or both. But probably not with DENIC.
Armstrong faces Tour exit - as little as I can stand Armstrong (and as little as I would want to see him at the Tour), the procedure here is simply ridiculous. Would the French proceed in the same way if the rider in question were French? What if, for example, Virenque were planning a comeback and a 20-minute delay occurred during a training control because he quickly went to shower?
Müntefering expects state participation in Opel - isn't it cute how they're hesitating to do exactly what they once railed against?
Preemptive obedience at DENIC - because, the police and surveillance state must be implemented. Think of the children! And protect us from terrorists! How, and incidentally, sensitive documents about sloppiness in voting machines are also blocked? Extremely convenient!
Discount — a C implementation of the Markdown markup language - the title says it all. Looks good, and should be many times faster than the other markdown implementations - which would also make it interesting for live use. And Markdown is many times simpler than Docutils (Restructured Text).
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 - interesting article about scaling with Amazon's Elastic Cloud.
jgm's peg-markdown - and another C-based markdown version.
Books on Board - another store that sells English literature as eBooks and also offers Epub. Even quite current books.
Moleskin page designer - a designer for custom page types for Moleskin notebooks.
Python MQI Interface - pymqi. Version 0.5d - MQSeries and Python. (not that I'm a MQSeries fan, I just might need it for work)
Sup dawg, we heard you like Smalltalk so we put Smalltalk in your Factor so you can send messages while you roll - an implementation of Smalltalk in Factor. Quite extensible and could also bring this nice environment to people who don't know Factor yet (sometimes starting with a known language is easier).
Welcome to Waterstones.com - their eBooks also work perfectly on the Sony Reader, and thus there is also a source with relatively current literature in English for it. Of course, DRMed.
An Experimental MacRuby - MacRuby will switch to LLVM as a virtual machine, moving away from the standard Ruby VM. Very interesting, as it promises significantly higher performance.
Head-shaking stimulus from Karlsruhe (only Regional Court) - so indirectly Google also becomes criminally liable because they also refer to Wikileaks. And thus everyone who refers to Google as well. And in general, everything is criminal. Probably another case of stupidly vague laws and judges overwhelmed by new technologies.
Telekom will iPhones Skype-frei halten - of course. Naturally. It's only because the voice quality could be worse than in the T-Mobile network. Logical. I mean, everyone immediately believes that Deutsche Telekom only doesn't accept VoIP and IM for the iPhone because of the quality. Users must be protected from the terrible quality! How stupid do they think we are at Deutsche Telekom?
Getting the most out of a 1024x600 screen - three posts with good tips on how to free up more screen space on small computers. Especially interesting are the configuration options for the Dock (you can actually make it a bit less annoying!) and the menu bar (auto-hide depending on the application) as well as the screen scale factor already used by me (also application-dependent).
Sweden's police: Child porn filters are not very effective - will the prolethicians and populists in Berlin now pick up this statement as quickly as they used the Swedish block list as a model example for their silly censorship action?
BKA witness lies (badly) about forged files - at annalist. Go read.
Review of 3D Engines for the iPhone - interesting overview of available game engines for the iPhone.
Somethings to rejoice about - about the changes in Erlang 13A. Especially very nice: finally real Unicode support in Erlang.
Intuos4 - Wacom drawing tablets with new pen technology - hey, it looks like I want to update my graphics tablet.
KeyCue - find, remember, and learn menu shortcuts - not uncool. Just hold down a modifier and it shows a list of hotkeys. Practical if you don't know all the hotkeys yet and want to learn them (because the keyboard is indeed faster than mouse around).
wikileaks und die Sperrlisten - was obvious, right? Does anyone really believe it's only about blocking child pornographic content? Wikileaks will probably soon appear on the block list as well, just like other undesirable sources on the net.
Coalition to soften plans against data misuse - because, one must continue to support the address freeloaders so that their absurd business model (selling addresses and then flooding mailboxes with trash that nobody needs) continues to work.
OLG Hamburg restricts forum liability - well, if a few more judgments of the LG Hamburg are overturned, the nonsense might soon stop that cease-and-desist letters particularly like to go there ...
One Laptop Battery Later And I'm A Django Fan - Zed Shaw guckt sich Django an. Und mag es.
Government wants to accelerate the expansion of online searches - of course, the lying pack in Berlin doesn't stick to what they themselves have said. Why bother. And constitutional concerns? Then the crazy wheelchair user will complain again about the Federal Constitutional Court for interfering. Meanwhile, the Federal Constitutional Court has been the only thing protecting us from the Berlin proletarians for quite some time.
Pig farming next to state guests - fits perfectly. One pig farming facility next to the other!
Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google - ok, basically what Gutenberg already does, but hey, I'm not complaining if I have even more books to choose from!
The iPhone can soon also do «Copy and Paste» - hey, cool, Apple is finally catching up with its own technology from the early 80s! (I'm an iPhone user and fan, but the missing copy-paste was really too silly even for me). Why, however, should multimedia messaging only be possible with the new iPhone? Well, never mind, somehow nobody really uses that nonsense anyway, right? Email is much more practical with the iPhone. And Spotlight on the iPhone could be quite nice - at least if it is designed to be expandable like on OS X.
RapidMiner - Data mining in open source. Seems quite interesting, might become interesting at some point. In Java, so it should also run on OS X.
Baen Books Science Fiction & Fantasy - another eBook dealer that doesn't have much DRM and offers books, for example, as HTML. Fictionwise has a wider selection, but Baen is specialized in science fiction and fantasy.
Calibre - free software for managing eBooks and synchronizing with the PRS-505. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Update: this thing is great! By far better than the included Sony software - and together with Adobe Digital Editions, you can easily buy your books from Thalia and transfer them to the device without any problems. Due to the DRM on books from regular sources, you need to use Adobe Digital Editions for reading (and probably for downloading as well), but otherwise you can fully use Calibre as a replacement for the somewhat cumbersome Sony software.
Sony Reader PRS-505 - LatheWiki - tons of links about the PRS-505, including how to patch the firmware yourself and links to programs with which you can manage the PRS-505 on systems other than Windows.
Bug #317781 - Comment #45 - very interesting analysis of the data loss problem with ext4. Summary: crap applications and libraries. Unfortunately, it also affects parts like sqlite (though only performance) and unfortunately larger parts of Gnome and KDE, which is why kludges are now being introduced in ext4 to work around them.
.epub eBooks Tutorial - how to produce ePub files with free software.